In the diegesis of Hardy’s novels, symbolic appropriation nature is manifest: it brutal, mortifying. Tragedy often results from a linguistic “error” that conflates bodies and tropes – deadly confusion between culture. Tess d’Urbervilles, Tess’s “corporeal blight”, which many Victorians viewed as moral “fault”, ceases to be metaphor when turns into “sticky blights” making real stains on her skin...